The First Tee Conundrum

Lorne Rubenstein

Lorne Rubenstein

It’s often said that every golfer on the range during a PGA Tour event hits the ball great and looks like a winner. This raises the question: Why is it so difficult to take one’s range game to the course, even for many of the best players? Or when it comes to putting, why can a player make, oh, 50 four-footers in a row and then not touch the cup on the first hole?

Every tour pro faces the challenge. Johnny Miller once said the longest walk in golf is from the practice tee to the first tee. I had a chat with 2003 Masters winner Mike Weir about the matter. We sat down at the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame and Museum at the Glen Abbey Golf Club on Tuesday, in advance of the RBC Canadian Open that begins Thursday.

Weir has had a tremendous career, notwithstanding his difficulties over the last few years. His Masters win and his seven other PGA Tour wins set a high bar for the talented group of younger Canadians playing this week. Meanwhile, Weir today still hits the ball beautifully on the range and often, but not often enough, on the course. Why, why, why, why, and not only for him but for his fellow PGA Tour pros, and also LPGA Tour pros?

“I’ve thought about the question,” Weir said as we sat in a room that 120 people would soon fill for the formal inductions into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame of wedge craftsman and wizard Bob Vokey and Judy Darling Evans, a winner of six Quebec Amateurs and the 1960 and ‘61 Canadian Women’s Amateurs. Her mother Dora also won both championships. They are the only mother-daughter duo to do that. They were able to take their games from the range to the course during some tournaments, at the very least.

“There aren’t any consequences on the range for missing a shot,” Weir, whose first Canadian Open was as an amateur in 1989, said, “but you try to simulate course conditions. Let’s say you are working on the shot you’ll hit off the first tee and you miss one. It’s not a big deal. But then you miss your first tee shot. Subconsciously there’s now some sort of hurdle.”

Weir said that when he played his best he didn’t feel much different from the range to the first tee, but that it’s obviously not the case as often for him these days. He hasn’t been getting the results during tournaments, and said, “You can’t fool yourself” into believing you’re swinging well when you’re not.

I was reminded of something Tom Watson said. He was known in the earlier part of his World Golf Hall of Fame career to make what became known as “Watson pars.” He could get up and down from anywhere, and was as near a sure thing on six-foot par putts as possible. His short putting eroded as he got further into his career, although his swing improved. It became timeless. No wonder he titled his last book The Timeless Swing.

Golf mavens kept saying that Watson, when he started missing short putts, should focus on the fact that he had made them all — well, nobody makes them all — for so many years. But Watson said he hadn’t made one that counted in a long time and that he couldn’t fool himself. Yup. That’s the problem.

“You have to simplify things,” Weir said of getting into the exalted, focused state every golfer seeks. “It’s a learned skill, and nobody masters it. When I had it I was lost in my own little world. I was able to do that.”

He was indeed. Think about when he beat Tiger Woods in their riveting singles match on the Sunday of the 2007 Presidents Cup at Royal Montreal Golf Club. Think about when he stood over a seven-foot par putt on the 72nd green of the 2003 Masters to tie Len Mattiace, who was in the clubhouse.

“It’s not going to ****ing end this way,” Weir told himself. He wasn’t going to miss that putt. Weir poured it in and won the sudden-death playoff to become the first Canadian male to win a major.

One of the most recent examples of a player getting into his own little world, of course, is what Jordan Spieth did on the 13th hole at Royal Birkdale last Sunday after hitting his tee shot off the map and into an unplayable lie in the dunes. There’s no need to review the remarkable sequence that led to Spieth taking an unplayable lie and then dropping on the practice range after he and his caddie Michael Greller deliberated for 22 minutes with rules officials present. For more insight into this, check out former PGA Tour winner Dick Zokol’s illuminating podcast.

“That was very impressive,” Weir said of how Spieth handled the strange and potentially ruinous situation. “It didn’t set his mind racing. From what I’ve read his caddie had a lot to do with it.”

That was true, and also much earlier in the round. Spieth missed a series of shortish putts on the early holes to lose the three-shot lead he started with over Matt Kuchar. With Greller’s help, he reset and dropped into a calm state. He told Greller “I know how to do this,” that is, how to find his game and win.

“A good guy on the bag helps,” Weir pointed out. He said that Brennan Little, his longtime caddie during his heyday, would help him get to the first tee. They would talk about hockey, for instance. Nothing about golf. Rob Roxborough, by the way, is caddying for Weir this week. They’re close pals. Roxborough is the affable general manager at The National Golf Club of Canada.

Every golfer tries to find a way to get himself to that first tee and into tournament mode. The players who win regularly do so more frequently. Years ago I was sitting with 1973 British Open winner Tom Weiskopf in the Glen Abbey clubhouse while Jack Nicklaus was coming down the last few holes. I asked Weiskopf what made Nicklaus, well, Nicklaus.

“Jack has the presence of mind to make the right decision in the heat when everybody else is freaking out,” Weiskopf said.

Nicklaus finished second in the Canadian Open seven times. He never won but he won everything else in the game. He was at Glen Abbey Tuesday morning to participate in a well-attended public ceremony honouring the latest inductees into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. At 77, Nicklaus remains a major figure in the game. He’s an oracle. When he speaks, people listen carefully. And when he competed, he was able to take his practice game to the course. Heck, he probably hit it better on the course.

“Jack had whatever it is,” Weir said. “Jordan also has it inside himself but in a different way. He’s kind of jumpy but obviously he has internal fortitude.”

Weir added that spectators often think that tour pros make the game look easy, but that there’s another side to competing.

“Sometimes people think that the best guys are striping it. But most of the time they’re saving shots with their wedges, making key up and downs and putts to get in with 68s and 69s.”

Still, Weir reiterated, a player can’t fool himself if he’s not swinging well or not making the key putts that keep a round going to generate a spark. Nicklaus said that Spieth would probably not have won at Birkdale had he not made the seven-footer for bogey on that near-calamitous 13th hole. But he made that key up and down and then nearly aced the next hole, which he birdied. He eagled 15 with a long putt, birdied the 16th with another long putt, made a six-foot birdie putt on 17 to match Kuchar’s birdie on the par-five, and it was game over.

Weir said that the player who isn’t able to take his game from the range to the first tee usually needs a spark to turn things around. Spieth got that spark when he made bogey on the 13th and became Secretariat down the stretch, just like that.

As for getting off that first tee, Weir reminded me that golf “isn’t a reaction sport. Guys walk through the tunnel and onto the tennis court and soon serves are coming at you. You’re reacting. Our sport is different. It’s slow, you’re thinking, you’re walking to your shot.”

And so the range to the first tee conundrum persists. It’s always been that way and won’t be any different this week when 156 talented golfers tee it up at Glen Abbey.

“That walk to the first tee is interesting,” Weir said. That’s for sure.

Lorne Rubenstein

GOLF JOURNAL

The thoughts and opinions of SCOREGolf Magazine’s longtime back page columnist and Canadian Golf Hall of Famer.

Bill Hardwick
July 26, 2017 at 2:21 pm

Hi Lorne
I agree entirely with your article, but as an aside, if 22 min is acceptable I spent a lot of time playing another game. Kucher had to hang about while Spieth fiddled, and perhaps no-one considered what the action or lack of it was having on Kucher in their private world. I don’t blame Spieth it was the R&A, they should, if they do not, have a guideline as to how long a ruling can take. I think slow players play slow, normally, Spieth is one of those. The R&A should be protecting the field, not adding to the problem. Was there any option Jordan and Michael didn’t consider in detail?